Factor Investing

Improving Low Volatility Strategies

The bottom line is that returns to the low volatility anomaly have only justified investing when low-volatility stocks were in the value regime, after periods of strong market performance, and when they excluded high-volatility stocks that have low short interest (providing clues as to how to improve its performance). This may be why live funds have been generating large negative alphas once we account for common factor exposures.

Analysts set price targets using trailing P/E ratios

Trailing twelve-month P/E ratios account for 91% of the variation in analysts’ price targets. We construct a new kind of asset-pricing model around this fact and show that it explains the market response to earnings surprises.

Can Skewness Identify Future Outperforming Mutual Funds

While the skewness metric did demonstrate that it could select funds with managers skilled a security selection, the fund’s expenses and implementation meant that the fund was just about able to cover its expenses, and that was before the negative impact of active management on after-tax returns—and the finding was not statistically significant at even the 10% level of confidence.

Global Factor Performance: September 2024

The following factor performance modules have been updated on our Index website.[ref]free access for financial professionals[/ref] Factor Performance Factor Premiums Factor Data Downloads

Can smart rebalancing improve factor portfolios?

This paper provides new evidence on the efficacy of prioritizing transactions so as to focus portfolio turnover on the trades that offer the strongest signals and hence the highest potential performance impact.

Fixing the poor performance of the book-to-market ratio

The authors effectively argue the case for intrinsic value and DCF based approaches to building Value factor strategies. The traditional value measures, especially the book-to-market ratio, are described as ineffective in today's market environment.

Factors and Taxes

As a result of the trading required to capture the premiums that drive factor strategies investors may face significant tax liabilities. The challenge for the [...]

Global Factor Performance: July 2024

The following factor performance modules have been updated on our Index website.[ref]free access for financial professionals[/ref] Factor Performance Factor Premiums Factor Data Downloads

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